Pocket Padding

Donald Trump Has Officially Reached Peak Conflict of Interest

It’s tough to be President of the United States. For Donald Trump, it is proving to be hard enough just planning for the gig. All that hiring, all that infighting and jockeying and posturing. All that learning! All those world leaders trying to reach you all the time and tying up the phone lines at Trump Tower. All these rules. The press, too, expecting you to tell them every single time you want to go out for a steak? And moving to Washington? Can you imagine?

But the most silver of all the linings for Donald Trump could come a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s where his shiny new hotel sits, in the Old Post Office Building. Long before he set foot in the White House, his company signed a 60-year lease on the building, for which they pay $3 million a year, from the Government Services Administration. But before construction wrapped up on the $200 million project, which transformed the 215 year-old majestic building with a 200-foot glass ceiling into a chintzy, gold-splashed eyesore, Trump had some issues with how the government was taxing the building.

Earlier this week, as he was sort of busy trying to figure out how to build a government in a few months, Trump’s company refiled a lawsuit seeking a refund on taxes paid for the new Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C. The company had initially filed suit in June but a judge tossed it out just a couple of weeks before Election Day.

The suit claims that D.C. incorrectly taxed the property as if it were a “fully functional and rent-producing commercial office building” while it was still under construction, according to Bloomberg. Valuing the building while lawyers said it was a “shell of a non-operational building undergoing a massive conversion to a hotel” resulted in “an assessment of possessory interest taxes that is neither equitable nor reasonable,” the court filings read. (Perhaps someone ought to mention that even though the hotel officially opened last month, two days before election, the property was still mostly empty.)

The two sides are also squabbling over the value of the lease, which the city initially assessed at $91 million. Trump’s development company placed it far lower—at $28 million.

So here’s where that silver lining comes in. Trump now gets to appoint a new head of the I.R.S. He also gets to appoint a head of the G.S.A. So the people in charge of agencies responsible for determining his taxes and serving as his landlord will now also serve at his pleasure. And what a pleasure that will be for Trump!

Now, Trump is trying to avoid an appearance of this conflict, and a violation of his lease. As The Washington Post reports, the Trump Organization’s lease says that “no … elected official of the Government of the United States … shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom.” His solution to this issue, like many of his solutions, is to put his kids in charge. “I would put it in a blind trust,” Trump said of his business during a Republican debate in January, when asked about exactly these potential conflicts. “Well, I don't know if it's a blind trust if Ivanka, Don and Eric run it. But—is that a blind trust? I don't know.” (It is not.) That is the logic the Trumps are going with. He is the new President, after all. Surely, he knows best.